A year ago I decided to rearrange the furniture in my studio. But there was a lot to move and sort so I decided to do it in two stages. Well, I never got around to stage two. Since then I’ve acquired a knitting machine, so things were getting a bit cluttered down the craft end of the room. Here’s how thing were arranged:
You can’t see the row of Ivar shelving that was behind me when I took that photo, but you can on the floor plan below (it’s along the left wall). Aside from wanting to reorganise the craft end of the room, I’d been eyeing the contents of the Ivar shelving that I’d intended to move during the last reshuffle. It seemed to me that there was a lot of stuff I didn’t need on it. I could probably reduce it from three units to two.
So I measured up the room and all the furniture, opened Illustrator and created a floor plan. The last thing I wanted to do was move everything only to find it didn’t fit. Here’s the before:
I woke up in the middle of one of the following nights with the revelation that the knitting machine would fit in behind the drawing board, and I knew I’d found the perfect arrangement. (Yes, I not only created scale drawings but dreamed about moving furniture. It’s not so weird when you remember that it’s the space I spend half of my life in.) Reducing the Ivar just meant removing the shelves that bridged the two units, and I wound up turning using them to turn the vertical card/paper storage into horizontal storage.
Once I’d worked out the easiest order to move everything in, I got stuck in. It took a couple of days, and now looks like this:
The previous arrangement had everything positioned against walls, which meant the studio felt very open. This arrangement ‘fills’ the room, but it also divides it into two: work to one side and craft/art to the other. So I’m not distracted from work by tempting crafty things, and I don’t feel like I’m entering a work space on weekends when I want to be creative.
It also meant the day bed wound up closer to a window, warmed by the sun and with a view over the back yard. Something that was quickly noted by another member of the household:
